Today’s customers expect interactions that are faster and smarter than ever across an ever-expanding range of channels. Enterprises are under increasing pressure to meet these expectations by automating conversations and interactions that are not only timely and personalized but also orchestrated across multiple channels. Smart Communications’ latest State of Customer Conversations report found that only 54% of customers are satisfied with the omnichannel experiences provided by their financial services, insurance, and healthcare providers – a number that has declined year over year.

This growing dissatisfaction highlights a critical gap between customer expectations and what organizations can deliver. Many still rely on fragmented systems and manual follow-ups, resulting in incomplete transactions, missed outcomes, and lost trust.

Smart Communications’ acquisition of Pendula addresses those challenges head-on by expanding its Conversation Cloud platform with intelligent orchestration capabilities. The result is a solution that reduces friction, increases completion rates, and extends engagement across high-performing digital channels such as SMS, email, WhatsApp, and RCS, helping heavily regulated enterprises connect with customers where they are, and ensuring every interaction leads to action.

“For Smart Communications, the future has always been about enabling smarter, more meaningful experiences with customers,” said Leigh Segall, CEO of Smart Communications. “The acquisition of Pendula is the natural next step in our evolution, solving a key challenge our clients face: orchestrating and completing complex, high-value customer interactions across digital channels, at scale. It also strengthens the AI capabilities already embedded into the Conversation Cloud – enhancing decisioning, automation, and personalization to help our customers engage more intelligently and drive better outcomes across every touchpoint. ”

As part of the integration, Smart Communications will bring Pendula’s Intelligence Suite into the Conversation Cloud, unlocking powerful new AI capabilities for smarter, faster, and more personalized conversations. The suite includes analytics, AI decisioning, and configurable AI agents that work within precise workflows and guardrails—ensuring alignment with each organization’s brand, goals, and compliance needs. From identifying trends and forecasting customer needs to delivering personalized responses and seamless handoffs to human experts, this AI-powered layer will help enterprises transform data into action and drive deeper engagement across every channel.

Pendula’s orchestration technology includes intelligent failover capabilities, ensuring that if a message fails to reach a customer via one channel, it is automatically rerouted to the next best channel. This significantly increases completion rates and reduces manual effort. Decisioning logic can be configured to guide the customer to their desired outcome and respond or redirect automatically based on natural language customer inputs. The solution offers seamless integration across the Conversation Cloud platform, and pre-built connectors for the world’s most trusted enterprise systems, including Salesforce, AWS, Snowflake, Zendesk, Stripe, and more.

The acquisition strengthens Smart Communications’ ability to serve the complex needs of enterprises in highly-regulated industries – where customer attention is limited, compliance is non-negotiable, and operational efficiency is critical. Pendula technology extends the Conversation Cloud with proven, enterprise-grade orchestration capabilities that help organizations increase completion rates, reduce manual effort, and ensure every interaction is secure, compliant, and connected across channels. Like all Conversation Cloud solutions, Pendula technology is built to meet the highest standards for security and compliance.

At Pendula, we’ve always believed that today’s customers want real conversations, not one-way broadcasts,” said Alex Colvin, CEO of Pendula. “By joining Smart Communications, we are combining our orchestration expertise with the global reach and proven capabilities of the Conversation Cloud platform. Together, we will help enterprises move faster, connect more intelligently, and deliver personalized experiences that drive action at scale.”